PerformancePoint No More

Just over a year ago I attended a lavish presentation to mark the release of version 1.0 of Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server (PPS). PerformancePoint was released in November 2007 to fill a gap in the Business Intelligence stack by incorporating monitoring, analysis, and planning into a single application. One of the big selling points to justify the $20,000 price tag for the sever component was that PerformancePoint included forecasting that allowed Microsoft to compete with other vendors in the planning space. Just 12 months after the release, PPS has been discontinued as an independent product. It appears that the planning component of PPS is being abandoned just like Microsoft Songsmith. Although score carding will be integrated into SharePoint there has been no official mention of where the budget and forecasting features will end up, although the rumours appear to be that they will end up in the Dynamics product line. So does the fact that Microsoft no longer has a budgeting and forecasting solution really matter?
- Peter Ward